How to Transfer Fermenter, Add Yeast & Seal

Learn how to transfer fermenter, add yeast and seal -- processes used in brewing beer at home -- from home brewer Chris Cuzme in this Howcast video.

Transcript

Hi. My name is Chris Cuzme. I am a long time member and current president of the New York City Homebrewer's Guild. Been home brewing since about 2001 and I love it. I'm crazy addicted to it and I'm happy to share it with you today. I'm also part of the New York City Degustation Advisory Team which I formed with my partner Mary Izette, NYCDAT.com, and I'll be showing you how to homebrew today. Cheers.

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Here we are, the final stage. Now it's time for the beautiful, wonderful magic of yeast. There's a saying that the brewer's make wort, yeast makes beer. We're in the final stage with our beer, or our wort. It still wort at this point. It's down to 65 degrees Fahrenheit. We're going to take out our wort chiller. A lot of people use different methods for their primary fermenter. The basic kits consist of a 5 gallon bucket. The problem with 5 gallon buckets sometimes are that they can easily get scratch which allows room for tiny microbes to get in there and stay in there and they're a little more volatile than, say, glass. So I tend to use glass as my primary fermenter and I will siphon it out here with a racking cane and go into my glass carboy and go from there. But today, we're going to go straight into the bucket. It is warm enough, cool enough to do this. One thing that by just dumping it in like this does, it will oxygenate the beer. The yeast at this point will need oxygen to start doing its thing. And now we're going to pitch our yeast. In this case we have a wide yeast package, see right on top of that. Put some starch in. And there we go. I have my sterilized mash paddle and I'm going to stir this a lot to try and really aerate the wort. I want it to bubble as much as I can but I don't want to do this too long because I don't want it exposed to the atmosphere too long. We're going to spray the top of our bucket. This lid has a hole in it and that is for the airlock which will let air out, our CO2 out, without letting any oxygen in. There's a piece that goes over the tube in the middle. This allows for water to go in, get trapped in that little case in the middle, go out through the airlock without letting anything in. And there's beer.